"Detonation," Sugi reported, obvious relief in his voice. "Right on target. Sixty kilometers out."
The displays went momentarily dark again as the electromagnetic pulse bombarded the ship and overwhelmed the sensors.
"Sugi," Brett said, "get the systems back on line as quickly as possible. We need to know if that Seattle was destroyed or just crippled or what."
"Going through the restart now," he said.
"Mandall, give me report on the laser damage."
"There's been no hull breach this time," she said. "It doesn't look like it was a direct hit. There's some damage to the rear of the exhaust port but that's the engine that's been shut down from the first strike. I'm showing no venting of gas."
Brett breathed a little easier. "Thank God for small favors."
It took nearly a minute before Sugi was able to get the display back up. It took another minute for him to process the signals that he was receiving and formulate a diagnosis of what was there.
"The ship is still there," he said, "but it's no longer firing, no longer under power. It's drifting on its last course. There are spot heat sources coming from all over it and some other strange readings in the low end."
Brett unbuckled from his seat and walked over, moving carefully in the reduced gravity. He looked at the images for a moment, trying to make some sense out of them. "They're venting," he finally said. "The hot spots are residual heat from the blast. The low end stuff is oxygen and hydrogen streaming out of a hull rupture." He pointed at some of the other spectrums, which should have been active but were not. "And look at this, no electromagnetic energy or engine heat from the aft section. Her engines are dead. She's just drifting, dead in space. It looks like she's slowly spinning around as well, probably because of thrust from the initial rupture."
"So that's a kill then?" Sugi asked carefully.
"It's a kill," he agreed. "Obvious hull rupture in at least one place, a large volume of venting gas, no power or gravity generation. That ship is dead. There might be some of the crew still alive if they managed to get their suits active, but I don't think she's going to be much of a danger to us when she passes."
"So we're safe then?" Hamilton asked hesitantly from her helm panel.
"Assuming that that was really the last ship in the armada, yes, we should be relatively safe. But just to be sure, let's not make ourselves so visible. Cut engine power on the remaining engine immediately. Bring us down to a tenth of a G."
"Right," she said, "reducing the burn to point one zero."
"And then start checking the thrusters one by one to make sure they weren't damaged by the hits. If they all check out, let's get a course change going."
"What course?"
"I'll let you know when I find out how bad the damage is," he told her. "Sugi, get the jammers shut down and let's start looking at the ships again just to make sure that none of them can get into range of us."
"Doing it now," he said, watching as his targeting information began to pop back up on the display one by one.
Things settled down a little over the next few minutes as the crew began to realize that they really were safe. Sugi was able to track that two of the rear screen ships — a destroyer and another Seattle — had turned around and were decelerating at full power to allow the crippled Seattle to catch up to them. But there was no way that they could possibly slow down enough to become a danger to Mermaid in any way. And a check of the area to sunward also showed that no other ships were currently coming towards them. That didn't preclude the possibility that there might be a WestHem controlled Owl drifting out there of course — in fact Brett figured that there probably was one in the vicinity since trailing one was standard WestHem doctrine — but at least they were safe from direct attack.
In the engineering compartment it was revealed that the bulk of the damage to engine number two had been in the exhaust portion. The fusion reactor itself had been undamaged and was still capable of providing power for the electrical and environmental systems. Granted, it would take about a week of repairs at TNB before it could ever provide thrust again, but at least the fueling systems and the propellant tanks themselves were still functional.
It was discovered that four crewmembers had been killed in the engagement, all of them as a result of the first laser blast. Two had been killed by the blast itself, their bodies burned to ashes and bone fragments from the energy. The other two had been blown out of the ship by the hull rupture, hurled through the two-meter hole in the ship and into space by the escaping air and then vaporized by the exhaust plasma coming from the engines. Six other crewmembers were rescued from the decompressed room about twenty minutes later, two of them injured by flying debris, but all alive thanks to their emergency suits. The room itself was sealed shut after the rescue and would be unused for the rest of the trip.
On the display the bridge crew watched silently as the Seattle they had destroyed drifted over the top of them, still moving at 70 kilometers per second, it's front and rear turning end over end, gas still streaming out of it. No laser fire emitted from her weapons. No signs of life were noted at all. Mermaid's laser crews kept their weapons trained on it as it passed, knowing that a single shot would ignite the pocket of hydrogen and oxygen that enveloped the ship, but not firing.
The maneuvering thrusters on Mermaid were all undamaged by the blasts and they were engaged to turn the ship back towards Mars and to raise it a little more towards the planetary elliptic. They accelerated on their good engine at .05 G in order to clear the area where the engagement had taken place. Brett wanted them to get lost in space again in case a WestHem Owl was moving in.
It was two hours after the detonation of the torpedo when the dead Seattle was finally in range of the rescue ships. They watched on the display as the rescue ships moved in and burned their engines to match velocities and dock.
"Well, that's that," Brett said, smoking another cigarette and sipping from his sixth cup of coffee. "If there are any survivors, they'll get them out." He looked over at Sugi. "How are we looking out there otherwise?"
"Nothing showing," he said. "If there's an Owl after us it must be way back in the rear not to have caught up with us yet."
He nodded. "I agree," he said. "My thought is that the entire armada has now passed us by. Good job, folks. Now let's secure from general quarters and start setting up a sleep schedule to get everyone rested up. Our job is done out here. Now we can start heading home. Hopefully the other ships in the operation and the MPG on the surface will make sure that we still have a home to go to."
"Sir," said Rear Admiral Brannigan, "I have word from the rescue crews."
"What is it?" Jules said. It had been nearly three hours since the torpedo had hit the anti-stealth ship Billings. The rescue crews launched from the Topeka had been aboard her for nearly an hour.
"No survivors found," Brannigan told him solemnly. "There are five serious hull ruptures and more than thirty smaller ones. Well over half of the crew is just plain missing, probably blown out into space or vaporized by the pulse. About half of the bodies that were found onboard appeared to have died instantly. They have severe burns to their skin and clothing. The other half... well... they were in the rear of the ship, the part that was shielded from the worst of the blast. They appear to have died from suffocation when their emergency suits ran out of air."
"There were no air pockets, no sealed areas where survivors might be?"
"None, sir," he told him. "That ship was fractured in hundreds, maybe thousands of places. The airtight integrity of all of the compartments was compromised. The rescue crews are trying to collect the bodies and get them aboard their own vessels now."